Linux Shell Scripting for Hackers

7

Understanding Privilege Escalation and Persistence

You’ve learned some important skills in the previous three chapters. In Chapter 4, Reconnaissance and Scanning with Nmap, you learned how to scan target systems to see which network services are exposed to the network. In Chapter 5, Automating Web Application Attacks, you saw how to exploit vulnerabilities in running web services, and in Chapter 6, Password Cracking Techniques, you saw how to gain access to a system by using automated password cracking tools. In this chapter, you’ll take the next step by learning how to escalate the privileges of an unprivileged user account that you may have compromised. Granted, you actually found a privileged user account in Chapter 6, because the msfadmin ...